Rabu, 20 November 2013

Tokyo Show 2013 Highlights: Yamaha Motiv Concept

The giant Japanese conglomerate, Yamaha, is today revealed as the
world’s first major manufacturer to adopt the revolutionary iStream car
creation process invented and developed over the past decade by
Britain’s master designer and former F1 guru, Gordon Murray.

The
fruit of the partnership is a lightweight two-seat city car called
Yamaha Motiv, made in both petrol and electric versions and specifically
engineered for Europe. If it reaches production, as seems likely, it
will represent the first head-on challenge for the Mercedes-backed Smart micro-car in 12 years

Though
Motiv is displayed in Tokyo this week as a concept, and still needs the
approval of the main Yamaha board to proceed, the car has been fully
engineered over the past 15 months for Murray’s patented iStream
production process. Yamaha and Gordon Murray Designs discussed
co-operating on a car project as long ago as 2008 but progress was
interrupted by the recession. Talks resumed in 2011, and Yamaha and GMD
have since worked side-by-side to develop the car.

“Forming a partnership with Yamaha is a dream for us,” says Gordon
Murray, who began his mission to change road car design and manufacture
more than a decade ago. “Yamaha has completely embraced the principles
of iStream, and could not be a more ideal partner. They have huge
technical resources, but their team on this project has been
tightly-knit, very skilled and very quick-acting.
Gordon Murray’s
central theme with iStream has always been to free car production from
the inflexibility and crippling investment costs of the traditional
stamped-steel, spot-welded construction process adopted wholesale by
mass manufacturers from the end of the 1940s, replacing it with a system
that depends on structures whose relatively simple tubular steel frames
(formed without the need for extensive stamping shops) have
class-leading rigidity and crashworthiness provided by super-lightweight
sheets of composite sandwich material bonded in to form the floor,
firewall, bulkheads and roll-over structure. It is massively strong and
durable, says Murray; F1 technology adapted to keep a lid on cost as
well as weight.

The Yamaha Motiv, around 50mm narrower and 60mm
lower than a Smart but almost identical in length at 2690mm, is about
100kg lighter. Its outer skin is formed in non load-bearing,
impact-resistant plastic which can resist minor damage better than steel
or aluminium, and is easily detached for crash repair. The ultra-modern
styling owes nothing to the experimental Murray T-cars, though it is
the combined work of a GMD-Yamaha design team.